


What A Hell Of A Ride

by jessie_5_c



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:48:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25391155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessie_5_c/pseuds/jessie_5_c
Summary: Life has never been kind to Nikki, until she met Hatch. What a hell of a ride they had after all. (Backstory of Nikki and Hatch, told over 200 hundred years.)
Relationships: Emori/John Murphy (The 100), Hatch/Nikki
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4





	What A Hell Of A Ride

**Author's Note:**

> What an uncommon fic, but those two, exspecially Hatch, totally grew on me. This though had to be written trough Nikkis eyes. 
> 
> Hope you’ll enjoy it.

Life to Nikki had never been kind. Daddy was a heavy drinker and slapped her, her older brother and Mom around until Mom decided to run of with another man, who might treat her better. Ten long years after she saw her mother the last time, Nikki drove by her house a couple of citys over. The fassade was new, kids were playing in the front yard, clean clothers, brushed hair, smiles on their sweet-ass faces. She saw her mother trough the kitchen window but she didn’t recongnise this woman anymore. That’s why Nikki never ringed the bell but drove on further until her car run low on gas. Her pockets were as empty as her bank account and she counted it as rare luck that that piece of junk she called a car didn’t gave up somewhere in the middle of the desert road she was driving through but in one of those tiny-ass citys that always needed a barkeeper. Great boobs were just a bonus to get the job. 

She was up for leaving this godforsaken place many times, but every time she thought she had enough money to leave, something happened. The first time her motor broke one hour out of Radiator Springs and she hiked back, leaving her junk metal behind. She almost stayed another year before she had enough money to get a new car from the car dealer in town. As her old yellow Lincoln stood in the parking lot of the cheap flat she rented, she knew it would only need a couple of weeks until she had enough money for gas. Vegas was her goal, maybe Reno before that, only someplace where it was easier to make money. But shortly before she was able to go the old woman who lived above her fell down the stairs and needed help for the next months. Nikki felt needed for the first time in forever and she stayed. She even spent the money she earned on stupid things that made life easier for Mrs. Huffmann. It didn’t hurt that the old woman complimented her beautiful blond hair and the head she hid under it. Go to college, Nicole, she told her. Mrs. Huffmann was the only one to call her by the name her parents gave her on her birthday. 

The third time Nikki wanted to leave town, days after Mrs. Huffmann died of a stroke, she met Hatch. Hatch didn’t call himself by his last name just then. He was still Chris, twentytwo years old, just a few days older than her, blond, blue eyes and the son of a fisherman running away from the sea. The tires of his car broke just outside of Radiator Springs and he was in need of a drink and some money to repair them.  
Nikki got it all for him, he was her next project after losing Mrs. Huffmann. She served him some Jack & Coke, gave him a cigarette and called old Rooker, who sold her the Lincoln.  
“I’m a mechanic”, Hatch half-lied. He repaired the boats of his father more times than he could count, but he never learned anything else than fishing. But Rooker had a soft spot for Nikki, so he agreed to give it a try. 

Life was good for a couple of months. Sure, they could have given themselves more time to date and get to knew each other before jumping in bed and maybe it wasn’t wise to let him stay in her flat from the very first night on, but something instantly clicked and Chris was the best lay she ever had. He was sweet too and nice to her. Nikki never knew nice. Her father certaintly wasn’t.  
Once they lay in bed, completly naked, the sheets long gone on the ground beside the bed. Nikki held a Joint to his lips.  
“Good one”, he commented as if he knew what he was talking about. Since he’d been with Nikki he started smoking more, drinking more, he even got a tattoo on his clean baby-soft skin.  
Nikki just stroked his shoulder, while she took a smoke herself. Really good pot.  
“Let’s go to Vegas, babe”, she told him flat out.  
“Okay.”  
“Okay?”  
“Wherever you want, Niks”, Chris said sleepily. He always was sleepy after sex and a smoke. When she was sure he was asleep, she kissed his cheek, softer than she even intended too, and whispered: “You’re sweeter than sweet could be.”

Nikki wanted to leave him behind. She knew she was a bad influence and even if the sex was good and between them they had enough money for rent, food and pot, life became to quiet for Nikki. She had been up and about on the way to Vegas for almost two years now and she couldn’t stay in this small and quiet town anylonger. She visited Chris in the Garage and saw him joking with his collegues. He looked good in his blue overall and with his hands deep down in the heart of a car. She saw him on the evenings, sitting at the Bar where she worked, talking to the townfolk. Chris was a peoples man, everyone adopted him in an instant and he was good and well in Radiator Springs. Nikki packed her bags on a dark november morning, while Chris was already off to work. She was two hours outside of town, when a unknown number called her mobile phone, one time, two times, three times. It was the Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinatti, Ohio. Her brother died of an overdose yesterday night, her father was in prison again and they needed her to organize the funeral. Could she come? 

Nikki turned her car around and drove back to the place she shared with Chris. She sat on the old worn couch in the living room, drinking cheap wiskey from the bottle and listening to her brothers favorites music through the speakers of Chris old Laptop. She only noticed she was crying when he came home from work.  
“What’s wrong, Honey?”, he said while enveloping her in his big arm and Nikki cried harder. She almost left him behind. Just like her mom did back then. What a stupid mistake.  
“You told me you would come, wherever I wanted”, she told him trough ugly sobs.  
“Yeah, course, Niks.”  
“We need to go to Cincinatti. You drive.”

And he drove, 12 hours straight in her old yellow Lincoln until they reached her old home. The house was run down, windows broken and the frontyard full of junk.  
“We can’t stay here”, Chris told her after inspecting the interiour. The door wasn’t even locked. Inside they found empty bottles of beer, moldy dishes, needles and remnants of the heroine her brother died on. The whole house stunk of piss and body odor. Nikki stood in the middle of the living room, she grew up in and her world shattered to pieces. She picked up a bottle from the floor and threw it against the wall. Chris had never seen anything worse than this.  
“Come on, Niks. Let’s take a motel tonight.” He would be forever sorry she had to see this. To live this. That night, as he lay next to her in a to soft motel bed, he promised himself, to take care of her. Nobody else would do so, not even herself. 

— <> — —<>— —<>—

Nikki was broken planing her brothers funeral. She had been close to him as a child, both left by their mother, slapped around by their father, bad in school, good for nothing little shits. They smoked their first pot together, told each other about who they hooked up with and who broke their young hearts. Nobody broke it was good as their mother. When Nikki left her hometown it was after a fallout her and her brother had. She wanted to meet their mother after their father had another stunt in prison. Her brother didn’t and he punched her cheek for the very first time in forever. Nikki knew he never learned better but she couldn’t forgive him, not even after she drove by her mothers house instead of going up to the door. 

Nikki was broken when she saw her father again the day her brother was buried. He was in cuffs but he went up to her and told her it was her fault. Everything had been her fault. Nikki was broken, but the pieces slowly mended themselves together, when Chris punched her father in the nose for that. They had to run then of course, in the middle of the funeral, but Nikki had felt alive in the first time since getting the call more than a week ago. 

They didn’t return to Radiator Springs, both feeling that they left behind the people they had been there. Money was tight and they didn’t had a job. They couldn’t settle in a town, not again, so they drove, occasionally stealing food and pickpocketing money in small cities. They got by until the Lincoln broke in the middle of Baltimore.  
“We won’t find work here”, Chris said, looking up at the new headquarter of the Eligious Cooperation. It was a tower, higher and more modern than any building they had come by on they roadtrip. They heard about it in the Radio Station. By now almost one third of the people living in and around Baltimore worked for that Company one way or another.  
“Crazy Shit they do”, Nikki commented and Chris huffed.  
“Yeah right, who would have thought that in 2038 we would sent people out into space to look for new energy sources. On mining ships no less.” Secretlety Chris was a nerd for such things, Nikki knew. He was always listening to the Radio and he remembered dates and facts about historical events like no one she ever knew before. Nikki hoped it wasn’t her fault he didn’t go to college. He would be made for it maybe, all brains that he was. 

They didn’t even found a place to sleep that night, even Motels around here were expensive as fuck. It was a shorttempered decision but when they sat in the stolen Ford Explorer they didn’t feel bad about it. If this was their way to get by than that was it. They were still low on money, so the next gas station they stopped at, they didn’t only steal food but also got the cashier to give them money. They didn’t even had to scare him with a gun they didn’t have. Chris old clasp knife, a remembrance of his fishing days, and that crazy attitude she got whenever the adrinalin flew through her veins and made her skin tingle with exitment, were enough to scare him. Nikki knew she was born for this. The chaos, the thrill. 

After that day, whenever rare times Chris had to introduce himself, he told his last name. Nikki thought it fit him well, he got some more tattoos, she liked the one on his neck the most and he grew a short jawline beard over the years they’d done their coups. His voice got rougher but he still called her Niks and got down on a knee in Arizona, when they stopped to watch the Grand Canyon. Hatch was still a sap at heart and she loved him for that.  
They had a pretty good time, their cons went well, nobody died and they had money flowing. Sometimes they quarrelled because she couldn’t sit still, even when they pockets where full of Dollars. The quietness was argonizing for her and the longer they lived that way the more she needed her monthly dose of Chaos. Other times Hatch was as happy as he could be, like when she told him, that she was pregnant.  
“We can stop. I’ll work at the Garage again, somewhere where nobody knows who we are”, he promised but Nikki refused. Their life wasn’t bad and a child was no hinderness to it.

They married three days after she told him that she was pregnant in a cheap chapel in Vegas. They did the whole shebang with an Elvis imitator singing Love me Tender, a pretentious borrowed wedding dress, rings they brought with stolen money from their last heist and Hatch telling her some sweet vows, about what a hell of a ride they had until here. Nikki remembered the odd three people who watched them marry were praying for them. Nikki didn’t knew if they were paid for it but years later, when she thought back to their wedding day, maybe she should have prayed too.  
Maybe she woulnd’t have lost the child while killing cops and hostages. 

— <> — —<>— —<>—

Their last heist went wrong and Nikki was sorry she brought Hatch down with her. Deep down she’d always known her live would lead here. To prison. Her father had sat in, more times than she could count, her grandfather had. She was just the next in line. But for Hatch it shouldn’t have ended like this. He didn’t want to kill the police officers, he even tried to stop her, but Nikki had been so full of adrenalin that she stopped thinking about the man she loved more than anything and the baby growing inside her. It was hard, being seperated from him but even harder to meet him again, as they were marched into a spaceship, set out for mining an astroid. Nikki took the deal, because she knew Hatch would do that too if they offered him. It all went back to the day in Baltimore when they stood beneath the Eligious tower, more than five years ago. Even though they both had changed so much as the years went by, Hatch never stopped to turn the volume up, whenever the news played in the radio. He always told her about what he learned later on, because he knew she never listened to the reporter. The last thing he told her was that Eligious III had started a colony mission with thirteen volunteers and an assortment of embrios to populate whatever habitable planet they would find. Nikki just wanted to be with her husband again, not caring about it being free on earth or a prison in space, so she went and she was right. Nikki knew Hatch like her backpocket. 

They shared a cell with eight other inmates. Sometimes when Hatch slept Nikki still saw the men he had been almost ten years ago when they met in the bar she worked at. What a soft boy he’d been. Nikki was still sorry for bringing him down with her, he was good at heart, but she couldn’t for the hell of it, imagine a life without him. 

When Charmaine Diyoza took over the ship and killed almost the whole of the crew - exept that little Lieutnant that helped her deactivate the choke collars around their necks - Hatch was out of his wits. He had been a model inmate those last months, working hard, putting his head down and doing as orderes. He was shocked only two times and those had been Nikkis fault too. She would never be able to apologize enough for the things she’d done to him. When he almost stepped up to Diyoza to stop her from killing, Nikki held him back and punched him in the kidneys.  
“Don’t you dare”, she said. She coulnd’t lose him becaus of his golden heart. 

— <> — —<>— —<>—

They went in cyro-sleep, kissing a last time for the next hundredandsomething years. They were woken by Diyoza and McCreary who were already at war for the last surviveable spot on earth. Nikki was at loss at what happened to the world they left. She remembered all the places she had been to with Hatch, the bar, the garage, their flat in Radiator springs. Her hometown, her brothers grave, the Grand Canyon and the Chapel they got married in. It was all gone.  
“It had been missiles”, Hatch told her, while they sat at Camp waiting for the group of wild earthers to come and fight for the last green patch on earth.  
“I don’t care”, she said unkindly. What use had his love for historical events, when all the last people on earth were here. Nobody exept Hatch remembered 9/11, nobody remembered Hitler. He was a dumb nerd and he had to stop if he wanted to survive in this place. Nikki had seen the kids they held in the Church, they had long since learned the art of surviving, and she heard they were nothing to the army that would soon come upon them. She really hoped McCreary was right and they had enough firepower to win this fight against those Savages. 

— <> — —<>— —<>—

They lost. Not only the fight but also earth. Nothing was left anymore. The last spot on earth was destroyed in a war and they were back on a space ship, not able to return to the ground. Hatch sat, back to the metal wall, and cuffs around his hands. He hadn’t put up a fight and for once Nikki was glad. They were among the last 36 prisoners alive. Who would have thought that? Certainly not her. Nikki thought back to the girl she had been, running from her father and her brother and the happy second family her mother build. The girl that met the fishermans runaway of a son, she would later call her husband. Never would she have imagined them to be among the last under 500 people on earth, without an earth. 

They went back to cyro-sleep because the Braniacs of the Savages said so and they were woken up, again almost a hundred years later, to build a compound after the Savages managed to destory another civilisation.  
“Body Snatchers, Niks”, Hatch told her by the campside they had to sat up. “What a crazy place.”  
They got the scraps for now and Hatch, who the others strangely exepted as they leader - really when had that happened - was okay with that. That night, while laying in their tent, he whispered words that sounded like they came out of the mouth of a young man, sitting across from her on a barstool and sipping Jack & Coke: “They’ll hold onto their word. They’re people like us, Niks. If we work hard, we will for once get to harvest what we sow.”  
“I don’t believe a word they say.” Nikki fumbled at her husbands overall and opened the zipper. She laid him bare and stradled him, her head almost reaching up to the top of the tent.  
“Honey, there’s no other outcome. Either we do what they say and hope for the best or we go out into these woods and die. You heard what they told.”  
“Who? The other Savages? I hate them all.” Nikki kissed his neck and nibbled at his lobe. He stroked her hips and told her quietly, voice full of exitment either by her naked boobs or the possible future he imagined: “It could turn out good, Niks. Let’s give it a try.”  
200 years with this man and she still couldn’t get enough of him, naive and sweet as he still was. 

Later that night she lay in his arms once again. He was almost asleep, but he cuddled into her side and whispered into her hair, making her laugh for the very first time in almost 200 years: “What a hell of a ride, Honey Bunny.”

— <> — —<>— —<>—

Nikki had been right to not trust these people, Savages and Maniacs that they were. The day that Hatch died Nikki broke and there was nobody to mend the pieces. She would never again kiss him, never again hear him tell her about all the dumb and useless shit that happened in the past, he would never call her Niks again. Nikki would kill Raven Reyes for taking Hatch from her. 

All lead to this, Nikki knew, as soon as she stood in the palace with a gun to the head of a girl that was just like her, as she realized moments later when her boyfriend stormed in and demanded her safety. No wonder he was protective as fuck, the way his girl was glowing of pregnancy hormons. Nikki was hestistent to kill them as soon as they told their real names and she drew the connections. They were still the kids in the Church, no body-snatchers but con-artist just like Hatch and her. All of a sudden she was back again in Colorado, Hatch by her side, begging her to stop, to run, to build a life for their family.  
“He was a true-blue hero. He saved all of us, Nikki, so think about it. If you kill these people it's sort of like spitting all over his good work”, the guy, John Murphy, said. He had been the last to be with her husband alive. She hated him, because he took the last moments from her and even more because he got to be the father, Hatch had wanted to be so bad.  
“Don’t do that, Niks”, she heard the ghost of her man say in her head - just like he had almost 200 years ago before they became murderer in a heist gone wrong - as the Savages stormed the palaces. “And don’t you dare die.” Nikki laid the weapon down.

**Author's Note:**

> Radiator Springs is the town Lightning McQueen in Cars ends up. So that’s how you can imagine the town Nikki and Hatch meet. You ask: why? I say: because I can. (The 100 needs a little Pixar Magic and Radiator Springs reminds me a lot of Radiation Kills, so what)
> 
> Them meeting in the desert (town) is a homage to Memori. As is a lot of their broken tires, getting a drink, us against the world doing cons attitude. 
> 
> Mrs. Huffmann is a homage to the actress of Nikki. As you might have guessed Rooker, Hatchs first boss, is a homage to the actor Chad Rook. The car might or might not be a homage to Lincoln. 
> 
> Hatchs first name is a homage to the role he plays in Siren. Chris is a fisherman who runs away from the seasidetown after some traumatic events. 
> 
> That Tower in Baltimore is to become the Tower of Polis. I played my creative freedom to also connect it to the Eligious Cooperation.


End file.
